Week Ending August 30, 2026

Developer News

The Maintainer Summit schedule for Kubecon North America is live; it includes two SIG/Subproject meetings and Ask The Kubernetes Steering Committee. The same week, the Kubecon Europe CfP opened.

Election Update

Voting is now open for the 2026 Kubernetes Steering Committee election. Six candidates are running this year, including Sean McGinnis (stmcginnis), Michael McCune (elmiko), Priyanka Saggu (priyankasaggu11929), Janet Kuo (janetkuo), Kaslin Fields (kaslin), and Jack Francis (jackfrancis).

Voting will remain open through October 1, with exception requests due by September 29. If you are marked as not eligible despite your contributions, please request an exception.

Contributor Blog

KCD Around the World: San Francisco Bay Area 2026 Organizers explores how KCD San Francisco Bay Area is bringing together a vast and often siloed cloud native community. Kashish Verma and Rey Lejano sit down with organizers Lisa-Marie Namphy and Jason (Jay) Smith to talk about how the event came together, what they learned from its first edition, and how this year’s KCD is evolving with the growing intersection of Kubernetes, AI, and open source.

Release Schedule

Next Deadline: v1.38 Release Cycle Begins, August 31

The Kubernetes v1.38 release cycle began on August 31, with the final release currently targeted for December 16, 2026.

Starting with v1.38, the release cycle has been adjusted to give contributors more time between Enhancements Freeze and Code Freeze. The change is intended to give KEPs more time to be reviewed and merged before Code Freeze. The schedule is still being finalized, so more details will follow as the cycle progresses.

Featured PRs

141660: Show Terminating status for StatefulSets in kubectl get

BitWeaverDev added terminating-state visibility for StatefulSets in kubectl get. This makes it easier for users and operators to identify StatefulSets that are being deleted but have not finished terminating, without needing to inspect individual Pods or controller details. The change improves the day-to-day observability of StatefulSet lifecycle operations and helps users investigate deletions that are taking longer than expected.

141556: DRA: fix extended resources when DRANodeAllocatableResources is enabled

harche fixed extended-resource accounting when DRANodeAllocatableResources is enabled. Incorrect handling in this path could cause the node’s available extended resources to be represented inaccurately, affecting scheduling decisions for Pods that use Dynamic Resource Allocation. This PR corrects the resource information exposed for DRA, improving coordination between node resource reporting and scheduling for workloads that use device or other extended-resource claims.

Subprojects and Dependency Updates

cri-o v1.36.4: fix crash in ListPodSandboxStats on cgroup cleanup during teardown, add per-container targeting for cpu-load-balancing/irq-load-balancing/cpu-quota annotations; also v1.35.7, v1.34.12
nerdctl v2.4.0-beta.0: add image convert –erofs, add container –mount type=image, use bundled containerd v2.4.0-beta.0
containerd API v1.12.0-rc.0: deprecate “allow mount handlers” in shim info in favor of mount capability extension

Shoutouts

Benjamin Wang: Shoutout to @Wei Fu, @Geeta Gharpure, @gyuho, @Piotr Tabor, @serathius, and everyone who helped complete the decade-plus migration from etcd v2store to v3store.

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